-- PaulLie - 25 Mar 2020

Journal Entry 1 -

Apologies, my first journal entry will be light on academic material and will serve more as an update of my status. Due to the developing covid-19 virus situation, the organisation sponsoring my studies had asked that I return to Singapore. As a number of airlines have been cancelling flights due to the increasing travel restrictions, this forced me to accelerate my travel plans over the last 3 days to catch the last Singapore Airlines flight out of NYC. Long story short, I just arrived in Singapore today and should be able to return my attention back to studies shortly (albeit at a different time zone).

An interesting observation which may be of relevance to the class is how Singapore has turned to technology to help contain its own virus spread. One method is through requests by officers to persons who are on stay home quarantine to share their location on watsapp. Another method is through the voluntary download of a tracing application, which uses bluetooth to maintain a record of nearby devices in order to help with subsequent contact tracing in the event the user of one of the devices is subsequently confirmed as a carrier.